Catholicism, Lessons in Irony & Hypocrisy

With all the Catholic sex scandal news as of late, I have been doing a lot of reading. I started thinking about all the hypocrisy and irony in Catholicism. I know these are not all original thoughts but I wanted to start compiling some. If you have more add them to the comments!

1 ) Why do Catholics have to get pre-marriage counseling from aÂ celibate priest?

2 ) The Pope refers to the blessed mother Mary with reverence and awe but won’t allow women to take any leadership roles within the church.

3 ) The Pope promotes abstinence as a form of birth control but worships Jesus Christ who was born of a virgin?

4 ) A church full of closet bound homosexual priests won’t recognize the basic rights of homosexuals?

5 ) Jesus lived a simple life and preached to the meek against opulence.Â The Pope lives in an opulent palace located in a freakin’ church owned sovereign city, adorned with goldÂ jewelry and robes so flamboyant they would make make Liberace jealous.

6 ) God has given mankind free will to determine it’s own fate. The Catholic church historically used the point of a sword to “help” native cultures determine their own fate.

7 ) If everything happens according to God’s plan, why did God allow thousands of kids to be raped by his “employees”? Was that his plan? If soâ€¦it sucked.

8 ) Catholicism is a religion that is famous for it’s guilt, so why doesn’t the Pope seem to have any?

10 ) Where does the Pope get off dispensing medical advice to an AIDS ravaged Africa about the incorrect science of how STD’s can pass through the pores in condoms when it wasn’t even until 1992 that the VaticanÂ admitted that Galileo was right about the Earth orbiting the Sun. Epic fail, fellas.

11 ) The Church that brought you the Inquisition, thinks the current media attention investigating Pope Ratzinger’s ignoring the rape of minimally a couple hundred children is unfair and hurtful.

4 Comments

1 ) Why do Catholics have to get pre-marriage counseling from a celibate priest?

I suspect the primary purpose is to counsel the couple on the importance of having children and raising them the Catholic tradition. In other words, it presumably concerns job security.

2 ) The Pope refers to the blessed mother Mary with reverence and awe but won’t allow women to take any leadership roles within the church.

Well, the Catholic church hierarchy has been a conservative club that arose at a time when women weren’t allowed to have a say in anything beyond the family. Additionally, it is presumably related to the evolution of celibacy in the church, which, in part, appears to derive from pagan traditions and from the desire to have the church be the beneficiary of any material wealth accumulated by a priest rather than having it be inherited by any spouse.

5 ) Jesus lived a simple life and preached to the meek against opulence…

I don’t think the Catholics are any different from other Christians on the matter of the trinity, but only biblical passage that explicitly delineates the trinity dogma is a passage that never existed in any of the original Greek biblical text. As discussed on page 81 and 82 of Misquoting Jesus, it is a relatively modern contrivance.

11 ) The Church that brought you the Inquisition, thinks the current media attention investigating Pope Ratzinger’s ignoring the rape of minimally a couple hundred children is unfair and hurtful.

“The Pope refers to the blessed mother Mary with reverence and awe but won’t allow women to take any leadership roles within the church.”

Because the Catholic Church is full of emotionally immature men who fear and disdain real women. The Virgin Mary is an ideal, imaginary woman to whom priests can give full devotion — a selfless mother figure with no personality or needs of her own, unlike real women.

Mary Daly discusses this phenomenon in THE CHURCH AND THE SECOND SEX, a scathing indictment of sexism in the Catholic Church.